I'm starting a new blog series much like the How I Work interviews (see: How I Work: An interview with Doug MacKay of Critical Mass) where I'll present the Jive expert with a series of questions and they will answer a select few in detail. We'll then ask the expert to do their best to respond to the blog comments within a specific time-frame/window. We hope to get some of your more burning questions answered in this manner plus it will help to get our experts tips-and-tricks out to our customers. It's a win-win!

First off, we are asking an expert in external communities. As such, I'd love to hear what your burning questions are. Please add them into the comments below to be included in the possible list. Please note, we might not be able to answer all of the questions (depending on the volume or whatnot) but we hope that each expert will be able to cover a few at a time in each interview.

Sound good? What do you want to know?!

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Categories: Adoption, Analytics and Metrics, Best Practices and Guidelines, Community Management, Community Marketing, Marketing Communities, Partner Communities, Support Communities, Training

In an external customer support community, when customer support/product managers interact with customers and answer questions, are there any industry best practices as far as how these internal user accounts should be set up? Should each support agent/product manager be set up with a named account or should there be a general account for the group to use? I have been doing some research of my own and it seems some used named accounts that identify they are customer support, some use named accounts without identifying the customer support role on the account, and still others seem to take the approach that several customer support agents use a generic account.

An illustration of what I mean:

Kathy Martinez- Customer Support (where I am named and my role is indicated on my account)

Kathy Martinez (where I am named and have not specified my role on my account)

Customer Support (where I am not specifically named and other agents could use this same account)

In an external customer support community, are there any best practices for what permission levels should be set for those internal employees or groups of employees that will be in the community interacting with customers and posting content for customer use? What is the best way to go about determining how to set up permissions? If you've started down the path in your community using user overrides to grant access full access to certain users, in light of best practices and evaluating the different roles necessary to support your community, how hard is it to change your permission strategy? Or is it best to stick with the permissions strategy already in place? I have been doing a lot of reading on the documentation regarding managing permissions. The sheer volume of information and the different levels of permissions available are somewhat overwhelming. I plan to continue to sift through the information to be able to more fully understand the scope of permissions but thought this might be an interesting topic to hear from a Jive expert on.

What improvements can we expect in upcoming Jive releases in regard to SEO? For element14.com, we've made a lot of improvements to Jive 6 (and will port these to JiveX 8 when it's released) but having more OOTB would help us. I documented our improvements in a private doc for Curtis Gross element14 SEO Changes

External communities suffer from spam attacks.. in fact the Jive Community is being hit quite badly right now (3rd March 2015). The tools that we've been given to fight this aren't up to the job. We've spent a lot of development time making our own anti-spam plugin that deals with this type of attack more effectively.

The biggest challenge with Korean and other Asian languages is that the keyword interceptors won't work: there are just too many characters in the languages and the search doesn't work well with these languages.

Need to throttle postings (e.g. users can only post 1 discussion every 10 min), setup newbie moderation and the ability to report users and not just their content.